Organized Crime in Armed Conflicts and Other Situations of Violence

by the 2000 United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) describes organized crime in generic terms as consisting of a structured group of three or more people involved in coordinated activities with the intention of seeking material benefits.1 On this score, organized crime certainly delivers the goods: all told, criminal actors generate at least $9 trillion in earnings every year, depending on who’s counting.2 Not surprisingly, organized crime is also detrimental to peace and security. In some cases, armed criminal groups fighting with State actors or with one another generate exceedingly high levels of violence and casualty rates far exceeding those occurring in some war zones. The human costs of violent criminality are catastrophic, including hundreds of thousands of lives lost and disappeared, tens of millions of ruined livelihoods, far-reaching restrictions on access to health and educational services and the corrosion of State and societal institutions. This issue of the Review features a carefully curated slate of articles examining the intersections between organized crime, armed conflict and other situations of violence. A particular focus of legal scholars is on the applicability of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law to organized crime groups in settings that are categorized as non-international armed conflicts or that fall just below that threshold. Other social scientists and humanitarian practitioners, in turn, emphasize the insidious collusion between organized crime and other State and non-State actors, and the opportunities available to mitigate its effects on the delivery of protection and assistance. A vexing question for lawyers, humanitarians, police and military alike is whether and when organized criminals fall under the provisions of IHL. Resolving this query is especially pressing in settings already beset by armed conflict or other situations of violence. Several contributors to this issue believe that criminals may be automatically excluded from IHL, since only groups pursuing political motives can be party to a conflict and thus be subject to that body of law. Others take an opposing view, arguing that it is pointless to impute